Law | The Verge

Apple hit with $5.7 billion in damages over haptic patents

2026-09-26T17:30:01-04:00

Haptics tech company Taction sued Apple in 2021, alleging it infringed two of its patents. Now a federal jury in San Diego has awarded Taction over $5.7 billion in damages. According to CNBC, "The lawsuit centered around U.S. Patent Nos. 10,659,885 and 10,820,117, which both involve vibration-based, tactile transducer technology that helps users feel a device responding to their input."

Taction argued that Apple's Taptic Engine in its Apple Watches and iPhones used technology that it had developed without a proper license, and the jury agreed. It found that Apple had infringed on two claims in one patent and one in the other. However, the j …

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Sony and UMG are suing Suno again

2026-09-25T15:09:57-04:00

Suno’s AI vocalists could learn a thing or two from this glitchy image. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

Sony and Universal Music Group filed yet another suit against Suno. The labels claim its new v6 model still infringes on their copyrights because it's trained on user outputs from previous models, which were themselves trained on unlicensed music ripped from YouTube and other sources. Sony and UMG are notable holdouts who did not sign a licensing agreement with Suno.

In its complaint shared with The Verge, Sony and UMG accuse Suno of "model laundering," saying:

"Training a 'new' model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of Plaintiffs' expression from the copied reco …

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Meta employees ordered ‘attorney/client privilege’ hats while fighting child safety disclosures

2026-09-25T07:50:48-04:00

Meta's lawyers have argued that certain evidence should be withheld from public view on the grounds of attorney-client privilege in the ongoing lawsuits over alleged harm to teens' safety and mental health. Lawyers suing the company said this week that the label has been applied far too broadly, while pointing to a recently unsealed document showing that the team behind launching Instagram's Teen Accounts in 2024 put in an order for baseball caps that simply said "a/c priv."

The lawyers suing Meta argue the Project Nido (an internal name for the Teen Accounts team) swag is part of "culture of privilege abuse at Meta" aimed at keeping the re …

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Reddit mod ordered to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in Switch piracy lawsuit

2026-09-24T11:51:46-04:00

Nintendo won its $4.5 million lawsuit against James Williams, a Reddit moderator accused of distributing pirated Switch games, as reported earlier by Aftermath. In a default judgment issued on Wednesday, a Washington federal judge also ordered Williams to shut down the online stores allegedly housing libraries of pirated Switch games.

Nintendo sued Williams, also known as "archbox" online, in 2024. In its complaint, the gaming giant claimed Williams became a "leading moderator" of the r/SwitchPirates community, where he allegedly solicited "donations" of Nintendo eShop gift cards and copies of Switch games "to be copied and distributed" on …

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Bernie Sanders proposes banning ‘superintelligence’ and putting violators in prison

2026-09-23T12:38:09-04:00

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) have introduced new legislation that would ban anyone from developing artificial superintelligence - a technology the bill describes as capable of the "destruction or disempowerment of humanity," including by overthrowing the government. Under the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, AI leaders would face up to 20 years in prison for violating the law.

The bill doesn't just take aim at the more powerful superintelligence, a term President Donald Trump said the US will use in place of "AI" in official documents. It would also pause the development of advanced AI systems, which lawmakers …

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The AI regulation smackdown isn’t over

2026-09-18T18:05:38-04:00

At the start of this week, the who's-who of AI seemed - at least tentatively - on the side of AI regulation. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed a three-step plan for slowing AI development, including by embedding third-party evaluators in labs, coordinating across the domestic industry, and forging international agreements potentially with government assistance. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and even SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly seemed to agree on aspects of all three things.

Anthropic and OpenAI had already been dropping hints that they and other labs were working on some kind of …

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OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

2026-09-19T12:18:50-04:00

Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times' case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies' own documentation warned that it was starting a "doom loop" that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the "largest theft of labor in human history," and that it made a "complete mockery of the idea of fair use."

Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht's assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge that "These comments ref …

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Your robotaxi might be a narc

2026-09-17T10:57:54-04:00

In early September, two teenagers got into a Waymo, but then ended up in the back of a police car. The robotaxi company said it detected "a violation of our terms of service involving a firearm," pulled the car over, and alerted emergency services, according to the Los Angeles Times. Police arrested the passengers after allegedly finding a loaded AR-style "ghost gun" in the vehicle.

The arrests exposed a lot of unanswered questions about privacy and autonomous vehicles, including what they are recording, what they do with the footage, and how much privacy riders should expect while riding inside them.

Waymo's camera-covered cars have alre …

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Waymo pulls over, calls cops on riders with a ghost gun

2026-09-13T10:28:12-04:00

Two people were arrested in San Fransico while riding around in a Waymo robotaxi after the cab pulled over and called the cops on them. The riders were juveniles in possession of a loaded AR-style ghost gun and were taken to a juvenile hall. While the police report did not specify who was operating the autonomous car, Waymo later confirmed it was one of its vehicles to the Los Angeles Times.

A spokesperson told the LA Times that a "violation of our terms of service involving a firearm" was detected. At which point the car pulled over and alerted the authorities.

Earlier this year, a Waymo faked having mechanical problems to pull over when …

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Lawyer fined $5K over AI-hallucinated witnesses in a murder case

2026-09-11T16:44:25-04:00

New Mexico's Supreme Court is punishing a lawyer for including AI-fabricated witnesses and fake police testimony in an appeal for his client's murder conviction, according to a report from Reuters. In a filing on Wednesday, the court fined Stephen Aarons $5,000 and held him in contempt for failing to "verify the factual claims and legal authority in his AI-generated brief."

The filing says the brief "contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses," along with "false testimony" about the shooter's clothing and appearance. Justice C. Shannon Bacon questioned how Aarons wasn't aware of the risks posed by AI during an August hearing …

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